Culture

The Dearly Departed

Elissa Schappell on two poignant, sharp-eyed nonfiction books: A Case for Solomon, the story of a lurid kidnapping case in 1912, and D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, the first major biography of David Foster Wallace.

Rarely do nonfiction books engage me so deeply and satisfyingly as Tal McThenia’sA Case for Solomon (Simon & Schuster) has. Exhaustively researched with Margaret Dunbar the book, which reads like fiction, revisits the sensational 1912 kidnapping of four-year-old Bobby Dunbar from the swamps of Louisiana. The discovery of a boy matching Bobby’s description in rural Mississippi and the shocking emergence of an indigent woman from North Carolina claiming to be his mother were red meat to newsmen ravenous for scandal. The nation was rapt for months, although the mystery wouldn’t be solved for a century.

The brightest literary star of my generation, David Foster Wallace had gifts as a writer and thinker that were as outsize as his loneliness and capacity for depression. The first major biography of Wallace, who committed suicide in September 2008 at age 46, D. T. Max’sEvery Love Story Is a Ghost Story (Viking) takes readers beyond the commonly reported aspects of Wallace’s life with the assistance of his letters, family, and friends. It’s no small feat. There’s Wallace’s celebrated writings and academic career; his longtime war with mental illness and addiction; his promiscuity and his romantic obsession with Mary Karr, the poet and later Wallace’s girlfriend; and his against-type politics—until the election of W, he voted Republican. Wallace once said, “Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.” While Max appears to greatly admire Wallace as a writer and feel compassion for him as a man, he is never starry-eyed, or pulls his punches. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is as illuminating, multifaceted, and serious an estimation of David Foster Wallace’s life and work as we can hope to find.